If God Exists, Resurrection of Jesus Is a Minor Thing

So is any of the other explanations offered by non-Christians

The historical and physical resurrection of Jesus is the bedrock of the Christian faith. Without this miracle, Christianity would crumble. Apostle Paul confirms this “risk” in his letter to the Corinthians.

If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. (1 Corinthians 15:17)

That’s why Christian apologists throughout church history spent a great amount of effort justifying their belief in it. One common approach is to rule out alternative explanations offered by non-Christians. The idea is that if all of the alternative explanations are shown to be implausible or improbable, then it is reasonable to believe that Jesus’ resurrection actually happened.

There is just one problem.

A person coming back to life after being dead for three days is not exactly a more plausible event.

A murder case as an analogy

Suppose a man is found dead in his residence. He was stabbed in his back, and his blood splattered everywhere, but there is no sign of forced entry and the entrance is locked from the inside. The detectives cannot figure out how the murder was carried out or how the murderer left the scene. One detective suggests the possibility of suicide dressed up as murder. Another suggests that the man was not dead when he was stabbed, and when the murderer left the house, the man locked the door himself and then died. All these conjectures seem far-fetched.

Then a random guy comes along and suggests that if all those explanations don’t work, the man must have been killed by the devil. Since the devil can pass through walls, it is conceivable that the devil stabbed this man, and promptly left the scene without any trace of evidence.

One detective sneers at the suggestion, saying that the devil theory is even less plausible than other theories. The random guy responds, “If the devil exists and is capable of murder, it is definitely conceivable that he is responsible for the death of this man. If all other explanations are ruled out, the devil theory is the only one left.”

Christians, would you buy this argument? Would you seriously consider the possibility that some supernatural evil force is the culprit of a murder? What about aliens, sorcery, or voodooism?

In case you have not noticed, it is the same kind of reasoning you use to justify your belief in Jesus’ resurrection.

The implications of presupposing God’s existence

In another article (link below), I discuss the logical fallacy of circular reasoning that is involved in presupposing God’s existence, so I won’t go into that here.

In this article, I want to focus on the practical implications of using that argument.

When one presupposes God’s existence, then anything could have happened during the time of Jesus’ death. We can imagine the real GOD (full capitalization) is not the Christian God, and the real demons, in opposition to GOD, want to entice people to worship false deities, including the Christian God.

In that case, the hallucination theory makes perfect sense. Demons could have caused Jesus’ disciples to have hallucinations so they mistakenly believe that Jesus rose from the dead. Demons could also have personally moved Jesus’ body so no one could find it afterward. Even if they did not carry out the action themselves, they certainly could have influenced other people to do it by direct possession or deception.

Another possibility is that those demons sustained Jesus’ health so he did not actually die on the cross, but merely passed out. Those demons then resuscitated him after three days and healed his wounds to make it look like a resurrection.

Or maybe those demons possessed the power to make dead people come back to life, so Jesus indeed was resurrected, but that was demons’ work, so to believe in Jesus is to be deceived by demons.

If you presuppose that supernatural forces exist, then anything goes. No explanation is too far-fetched or implausible. The only limitation is your creativity. You cannot rule out any explanation; nor can you judge which explanation is the most probable one.

At this point, some Christian readers might disagree with me by thinking, “We are not talking about presupposing any kind of deity, but the Christain God.”

Well, if that’s what they have in mind, then it is a direct admission of circular reasoning. You presuppose your God is real in order to make a case that your God is real.

How about other if’s?

If the clause “If God exists …” is permissible, how about other if-clauses that presuppose other kinds of supernatural or weird stuff?

“If aliens exist, they could have tricked the disciples by resurrecting Jesus or posing as one. Maybe Jesus was an alien disguised as a human being all along.”

“If time travel is possible, Jesus could be from the future, and the supposed resurrection could be his appearance before he was killed.”

“If superpower is possible, Jesus could be one of the lucky ones who possess the ability to come back to life after being killed.”

“If qigong is real, Jesus could have been a qigong master that enabled him to control his vital signs and pretend to be dead temporarily.”

“If ghosts are real, they could have revealed themselves to the disciples in the form of resurrected Jesus.”

“If Buddha or Guanyin is real, they could have been very compassionate to the distraught disciples and gave them a vision of Jesus’ appearance because that’s what they needed at the moment.”

The point is: Why should we be constrained by only one if-clause, the one advanced by Christians?

If you think those suggestions are too random or absurd to be viable options, I agree with you. So is the suggestion that the Creator of the Universe comes to planet Earth as a human being, and dies a horrible death to save humanity from being punished by Himself. Many people are dumbfounded by those teachings in Christianity too.

Summary

Many Christians believe that the resurrection theory is the best explanation among other naturalistic alternatives. That is because they conveniently forget how rare resurrection actually is. They think that by presupposing God’s existence, its rarity could be dismissed. The problem is that the same presupposition could also be used to increase the likelihood of other explanations. In the end, appealing to that presupposition does not bring us closer to the truth. It’s better to focus on the facts.

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